From The Heart # 15: On Food And Health

Ever wonder why “everything in moderation” keeps failing you? We take you behind the mic for a candid, unscripted walkthrough of lifestyle medicine, clearing the fog around saturated fat, LDL cholesterol, and the plant-based label that marketing loves to misuse. This is a straight line from science to your plate, framed by systems that hold when life gets messy.

I share a New Year milestone, board certification in lifestyle medicine, and what it means for training new physicians to prevent disease, not just treat it. 

From hypertension and insulin resistance to cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative risk, we break down how daily choices shift outcomes. Instead of food tribalism, we focus on substitution and dose: what you replace matters, and how much you eat changes the effect. We also unpack the confusion around food guides and why recommending high-saturated-fat patterns clashes with decades of evidence.

If the term “plant-based” makes you roll your eyes, you’ll appreciate our practical spin. Think plant-forward, not perfection. Audit the 8 to 12 meals you already rotate and nudge them forward with low-friction swaps: soy milk for dairy, flax “eggs” for baking, beans or tofu for half the meat in chili and tacos, and seitan or tempeh for quick, high-protein dinners. We talk habit stacking, building systems that outlast willpower, and aiming for consistent wins over time. Health is a trajectory, not a label, and imperfect progress by many beats perfect adherence by a few.

If you found this helpful, tap follow, share it with a friend who’s plant-curious, and drop an emoji in the comments to boost the show. Want more? Grab free resources at our site and subscribe for future deep dives into nutrition, fitness, sleep, stress, and the everyday habits that move the needle.

Go check out my website for tons of free resources on how to transition towards a healthier diet and lifestyle.

You can download my free plant-based recipes eBook and a ton of other free resources by visiting  the Digital Downloads tab of my website at https://www.plantbaseddrjules.com/shop

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You can also watch my educational videos on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMpkQRXb7G-StAotV0dmahQ

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Thanks so much!

Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules 

Transcript

Section A

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yo, Plant Biggs buddies, welcome to a new segment that I'm calling from the heart. These are bonus episodes, there's no script, no plan, just honest conversations and lessons that come straight from real patience and real life. Now most of the time I just hit record and I speak. And what you're hearing is draw, it's unscripted, and it's intentional. But if you're ready for something a little bit more spontaneous, this is from the heart. Happy New Year. Wanted to talk about a few things that went on in the last few months. Life updates and segue into new formats and new subjects and new topics I want to discuss this year. So, number one, in December, I finally finished my board certification review exam. I am now officially a diplomat of the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine. I had been working on diplomas in nutrition before working up towards getting expertise in lifestyle medicine. I've, in retrospect, I've been practicing lifestyle medicine for years without calling it lifestyle medicine. So it was a lot of fun getting that new diploma in that area of expertise with the goal of now bringing all of this new knowledge to my interns, to my students that will be starting the lifestyle medicine residency curriculum in July. So that means that new doctors that are going to start doing their medical training will get up to a hundred hours of training in lifestyle medicine, up to 400 patient encounters, opportunities to coach and to learn and to practice the principles of lifestyle medicine that I've been teaching here. Now, obviously, my passion is fitness and nutrition. So these subjects, they absolutely kind of bleed into my content a lot more. But lifestyle medicine is an evidence-based medical specialty recognized internationally that focuses on preventing and in some cases even reversing diseases with lifestyle medicine. That means evidence-based guidance based on the six major pillars of lifestyle change that include changes with your nutrition, with your physical activity, with sleep, with stress management, social connections, and the avoidance of toxins. Cigarettes and alcohol being the main ones, but also pollution in the air, or microplastics, or forever chemicals, or other toxins that we could get through our foods. And I think this is where our healthcare system is lacking. And I think that's why most people come to see a doctor. There's always this pushback on anyone trying to change medical curriculums because we do need doctors. People get ear infections and throat infections and they get COVID and they get rashes and they cut their legs with chainsaws, even if they have the best lifestyle ever. Accidents do happen. People do sometimes have bad genetics that do lead to poor outcomes. Lifestyle medicine is an evidence-based medical specialty that focuses specifically on medical conditions that are related to lifestyle. So hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol, insulin resistance, and all that spectrum, cardiovascular disease like stroke and heart attack and erectile dysfunction, and different transitional phases of life like fertility and menopause, neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's Parkinson, autoimmunity, inflammation. We learn about the pathogenesis or the root cause, as the internet likes to call it, of disease, with the goal of acting directly on it before it turns into a medical condition that you then see your doctor about. But if you look at the scientific consensus as a whole, we should be centering our diets around fruits, veggies, whole grains, nuts and seeds, and high protein foods like legumes, beans, chickpeas, lentils, soy products, as well as other lean animal products if you're going to include them in your diet. So lean meats, low-fat dairy, and fermented forms of dairy, and eggs. Right? Now, any single food can fit in a healthy dietary pattern. The dose matters, and what's very important to understand when talking about nutrition science is substitution, right? What I mean by that is what you're replacing foods with. So if someone asks me, are eggs healthy? Well, in comparison to breakfast sausages, absolutely. In comparison to a bowl of oatmeal with berries and hemp seeds and chia seeds, probably less, right? Now it depends if are you eating five eggs or are you eating one egg? And if you're deficient in the nutrients that are contained in an egg, the eggs are going to be healthy for you, right? Now, generally, eggs are recognized absolutely as a nutrient-dense option for those who want to consume animal products. But what's important to understand is that food comes as a package. Now, even if a food has a lot of iron, doesn't mean that it's not full of cholesterol and saturated fat, which are linked to negative health outcomes. So I'm talking about red meat, for example. Just much in the same way as you can actually eat too much spinach and get kidney stones, right? Everything in moderation is something you've probably heard before. Moderation refers to a quantity, a frequency, or in other words, a dose. So when we say everything in moderation, we need to know what moderation means, right? So if I say spinach and soy milk in moderation, and for you, moderation means these foods are healthy, so I'm just gonna go crazy and drink all of the soy milk and eat all of the spinach. You may get thousands of milligrams of calcium in one day, reach an upper limit, and actually put yourself at risk for the toxicity that can come from excessive calcium intake. Now you would require high doses of that for it to happen, but too much of anything can be bad, even if that food is typically good for you, right? Much in the same way as we say red meat in moderation, but we need to understand what moderation means. And we know that your intake of saturated fat is the type of what we call bad fat that's in animal products typically related to increased risk of cardiovascular disease. So if your dose of moderation means you're gonna eat a 10-ounce steak every single day, well then you can assume that you're going you're going to surpass the upper tolerable limit or recommended limit of certain nutrients. For example, if I tell you you should be eating or aiming for less than 10% of calories from saturated fat on a daily basis, that's probably somewhere between 20 to 22, 23 grams of saturated fat for most people, depending on how many calories they ingest. It's actually pretty easy to surpass that if you're eating a lot of animal products and you're not considering the dose. So, where I'm going with here is that certain nutrients are associated with poorer health outcomes, and certain nutrients are associated with better health outcomes. But we don't eat nutrients, we eat food, and we don't just eat food, we eat mixed meals that contains all sorts of nutrients, right? So when someone says everything in moderation, absolutely need to consider dose. And we know what safe doses of certain nutrients are, and I think that's why the latest version of the food guide in the United States, the food pyramid, created a lot of controversy because if you look at the top of the pyramid, they're recommended, they're recommending full-fat dairy and red meat in portions that if you actually follow these guidelines, you will eat more than 10% of your calories from saturated fat. And if you look, you actually read the guidelines, the guidelines even recommend consuming less than 10% of calories from saturated fat. So that's where the confusion lies, where people are saying, look, if you read the guidelines, they make sense. I mean, they recommend less sugar, less added sugar, less processed food, less refined grains, less than 10% of saturated calories, daily calories coming from saturated fat. We all agree with that. That's I agree with that completely. That's in most of the country's medical guidelines, even medical associations like the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association recommend that they even shoot for lower, less than five to six percent of calories. That means less than for most people, less than 10 to 12 grams of saturated fat per day, which is almost impossible if you're eating according to that new US food pyramid. So I'm not there to convince people to eat in a way they don't want to eat. I just want to make sure that people are that we are transparent and people are well aware of what happens uh when you fight biology, right? We have a lot of data showing that, I mean, almost all of the data is converging towards more saturated fat, raises LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol, and raises your cardiovascular risk. So, regardless if your influencer is highly confident in saying that we're tricking you by telling you to lower your cholesterol and lower your saturated fat intake, I mean we have systematic reviews and meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and Mendelian randomization trials and all sorts of prospective core studies done on millions of people for decades, all pointing towards the same conclusion. Less saturated fat equals less cardiovascular disease. So when your food pyramid gets flipped on its head and recommends food that are high in saturated fat, it kind of goes against the bulk of the latest 50 years of research. And that's why there's been a lot of pushback against that food pyramid. That being said, you actually read the guidelines, they still say what a lot of us agree on. Eat mostly whole foods, eat more plants, more fruits, more vegetables, more whole grains that are unrefined. Eat beans, chickpeas, soy products, lentils, nuts and seeds, healthy fats, right? Uh and by healthy fats, we typically are referring to omega-3, omega-6, and omega-9. So polyunsaturated fats, omega-3s and six, and monounsaturated fats, omega-9s. Not talking about animal fats, right? Now, if animal products are part of your diet and you want to keep them there, that's that's okay. We just want to make sure that people understand that the scientific literature shows as you reduce animal products and animal fats, chronic disease risk goes down and your health improves, right? So I think that's what's reflected in most of the literature, including our own Canadian food guide, as well as the one in Brazil, Nordic countries, Japan, places where food science is pretty evidence-based. Now, where people get things wrong is the term plant-based has been hijacked, hijacked for marketing purposes. And when I speak about eating a plant-based diet, I mean people need to understand what plant-based actually means. And I think a lot of people here uh have been following this channel for years, and the I think the plant-based I talk about most of the time is much different than the plant-based movement that you see online. Now, people go plant-based for all sorts of different reasons. Some people do it for health, some people do it for ethical reasons, some people do it for the environment. I do it for all of these reasons. I eat plant-based, 100% whole food plant-based, because it fits with what I want to do. But I want to be transparent and make sure that people understand that you do not need to do that 100% of your calories, 100% of your days to be healthy. You do not need to run marathons to be fit, and you do not need to be in the gym 15 hours a week to be strong. Much in the same way as eating a healthy diet is what you're doing for most of your calories over most of your days and most of your weeks over years. Your health outcomes will be determined by what you do most of the time with most of your calories, right? So, much in the same way as eating a piece of broccoli once a month, it's not gonna make you healthy. Eating unhealthy food, unhealthy foods. I do not like labeling foods good or bad, all foods can fit in your diet. Uh, I did eat junk food during my vacation in Disney, and I don't think I'm less healthy overall because of it, right? So, all foods can fit in a healthy diet, it just depends on the dose. So, when someone says I want to go plant-based, I think I want to make sure that they understand that plant-based is an umbrella term that refers to a diet that is made predominantly of whole plant foods: fruits, veggies, whole grains, nuts and seeds, uh, herbs and spices, and legumes. Plant predominant, plant-rich, plant forward, plant-centered, plant curious would all be other politically correct terms. But for some reason, the plant-based term has kind of been hijacked online and is used for marketing reasons, and people get triggered by that term. Now, our Canadian food guide is plant-based. It's half of our plate are fruits and veggies, a quarter are whole grains, the other quarter is a protein food group. They remove the dairy and the meat and substitute food group and replaced it by a protein food group with a special focus on adding more plant-based proteins. And when they say plant-based proteins, typically we're talking about whole plants that are rich in protein, like whole or minimally processed plants, so tofu, tempeh, edamami, seitan, certain whole grains of higher protein content, certain nuts are high in protein, they're primarily primarily a high-fat food, a healthy fat food, but they do contain protein, hemp seeds, soy milk, they're not referring to beyond meat burgers. Now, I eat them and they can absolutely be part of a healthy diet. But when people say I would never go plant-based, I think that if you're eating most of your calories from whole plant foods, you're you are on a plant-based diet. If you're eating a Mediterranean type food pattern or a flexitarian dietary pattern, or you eat a vegetarian diet, or a vegan diet, you are on a plant-based diet. People conflate the two terms. Vegan diet describes, or a vegetarian diet typically describes what you don't eat. So if you are a vegetarian, you don't eat meat, but typically you could eat animal byproducts like eggs and milk, for example. And people who are vegan don't eat animal products. So these terms are used to describe exclusions or restrictions in their diet and they're not necessarily descriptive of the quality of their diet. So the term plant-based was coined to describe a diet that is centered around whole plant foods. And then the term whole food plant-based was coined, I take my, I think, by Dr. Esselstein, to describe the fact that whole or minimally plant-based foods and not necessarily plant-based meat substitutes, we could talk about these another time because theoretically, and not just theoretically, in the science literature, it seems like they're still healthier than the whole foods like red meat that they're trying to replace, right? So just focus on eating more plants. Don't try to label your diet. I think that most people try to call their diet something. I mean, I am an advocate and a I think try to move that plant-based movement forward because I believe that people sometimes when they have more rigid rules or guidelines or guardrails, they try to have it's easier for them to follow and to be compliant. So for sure, I describe myself as consuming a 100% whole food plant-based diet for health, environmental, and ethical reasons. But I want to people I want to make sure that people feel comfortable in understanding that you do not need to be 100% whole food plant-based or vegan to be healthy. I mean, if you want to be vegan for the environment or for the minimize exploitation of animals, that's that's great and that's your thing. But here I want to make sure that we stay in the lane of health and talk about health, talk about nutrients and food science. We need to be able to talk about the science and separate that from the environmental part and from the ethical part. I am a doctor, am a scientist to start with. And I want to make sure that people understand that, right? Cool. So today I talked to a patient that wanted to consider going on a plant-based diet. And my tip to him was simple. Start by looking at what you're actually doing right now and try tweaking it, right? So where vegan and vegetarian terms kind of describe what you're not doing, plant based eating describes adding whole food, an abundance of whole, diverse, colorful plant foods that are minimally processed or Process to your diet. So the best thing to do is to look at what you're actually eating right now. Most people are rotating anywhere between 8 and 10 or 8 and 12 meals that they rotate year-round. And just to see if you can kind of make these recipes more plant forward, either by ingredients that you substitute or swap. That could be maybe making what we call a plant-based egg by using flax seeds and water. Some people will use it with chia, some people will use applesauce. Some people will start using soy milk instead of cow's milk in certain recipes. Certain people will throw in a can of black beans instead of ground beef. I use TVP, textured vegetable protein in a lot of my recipes, or we make Satan, a high protein plant source, instead of using animal products. So for a lot of people, it's about swaps, it's about making their recipes plant forward, it's small tweaks, so that it doesn't create a lot of friction with your life. When people get into January, New Year's resolution mode, they want to make big drastic changes, and very often the willpower is a finite resource. So people are motive, motivated, and inspired, but that fizzles out because very often it's the it's not the choices that you're making that are wrong, it's your systems that you've built that are failing you. So willpower is a system, it can help, it can produce this induction phase, this spark at the beginning of a journey that's self-motivating. But the most important thing is that life deals curveballs, and you need to have a system in place that withstands a curveball. So I'd say the system that you're using right now, you're better to tweak that one to try to than to try to create a new one. Now, James Clear wrote Atomic Habits. I love the way he coined it as habit stacking, but it's basically doing something that you already do and tweaking that or adding something to it. So if you're already eating eggs and bacon for breakfast, eating eggs and plant-based meat substitutes would be a step in the right direction. Maybe not the end of your journey, but I always explain that when I decided to go plant-based when I got sick, it took me anywhere from 12 to 18 months to transition completely. I always had the goal of going all the way to a 100% whole food plant-based diet because the little scientific literature seemed to show that as close to that edge as you can get, the lower your risk of many chronic diseases. Now, some people don't want to wring every single drop out of that lemon. I wanted to get it all, so I decided and I was motivated to go towards 100% whole food plant-based, but I knew that it's gonna be a slow journey. I needed to set myself up with small frequent winds along the way, and that that's not necessarily everyone here's goal, right? And that's okay if it's not your goal. My purpose here is to help you add more plants to your plate. And if you want to go 100% plant-based, I can definitely help you with that. But I understand that we need a lot of people to eat an imperfect plant-forward diet more than we need a few people doing it perfectly. Cool. Hope it helps. You put any emoji in my comment section, algorithms help make my content discoverable to more people. And I think that's really why you who are watching this video right now or who or who are reading my post, you are the reason that my content has seen considerable growth over the last six months. I've been here for years, but I know a lot of people watching it today will just be seeing me for the first time. Cool. Happy New Year. Have an awesome day. Take care. Peace out. Hey everyone, go check out my website, planetbase doctorjoules.com, to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr.JuelscoreNe. And on YouTube at Lightbase Dr.Jules.